The Orientalist and the Ghost

by Susan Barker

  ‘Um, Spencer, would you mind scooting off the lavatory for a moment or two? My bladder has been misbehaving of late, and I’m afraid there might be an accident if I don’t empty the damn thing …’

  From the lieutenant’s nether regions came the flatus eruption of indifference. I’d half a mind to go over there and relieve myself on top of him! (After all, whatever non-corporeal substance the lieutenant was made of would be no obstruction to the tinkling of my watering spout.) But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even after the savagery I’d encountered in the Malayan jungle, I was an incurable gentleman. I would not, could not, piss on old Percival when he had Asiatic cholera. I reluctantly sized up the washbasin before making one last appeal.

  ‘C’mon, Spencer old boy, it won’t take a minute. Then the lavatory’s all yours for the rest of the night.’

  It appeared this was one last appeal too far. The policeman’s head reared up, pale and serpent-like, his eyes red-rimmed and Satanic.

  ‘Look ’ere, you posh tosspot. If it weren’t for me, tigers would ’ave eaten you and orang-utans would ’ave ’ad your eyes out. So bugger off and let a dying man ’ave a shit in peace!’

  Sighing, I pulled the light cord, leaving in the dark the man who’d saved my life and the wriggling wall-to-wall infestation of myriapods and annelids. My foot tingling with pins and needles, I tottered back to the living room and set up the cumbersome fold-out bed. I lay down and pulled the blankets up to my chest, determined to ignore the angst of my bladder. But I nodded off to dreams cataclysmic with tidal waves and biblical floods, and in the morning woke to cold damp sheets, my need to urinate taken care of itself.

  Falling in love changed the relationship of my senses to the world. Love abstracted me from the here and now – the there and then. I’d eat a three-course meal without tasting a single bite, type out a letter to the District War Committee, as dictated by Charles, and not register a word of what was said. I became accident prone, bashing my shins and promenading into doors, mottling my skin with navy bruises; stars and tweety-birds circled my concussed bonce. Eros heightened my compassion for others, made my heart an organ of unspeakable tenderness, my ribcage useless armour. I saw beauty in the hoary faces of old women, and the destiny of children, busy gambling with bottle tops, to grow up and fall in love and beget children who’d do the same. I sympathized with my enemies and every glower that came my way. Love makes humanitarians of us all. And it also makes us smug fools. And there were none more smug and foolish than I.

  After our first night together Evangeline confessed to the missionaries a deepening spiritual crisis and a need of further solitude to study the Bible and seek the Lord. This proved irresistible to Blanche and Marina, and they agreed to babysit Grace every third or fourth night. In exchange for the babysitting, Evangeline offered her services as laundress and charwoman, helping with chores and joining them for daily prayers. The spiritual crisis was fictitious, of course, and spending so much time at the mission was purgatory for my beloved. Long reconciled to a Godless universe, on her nights of freedom Evangeline would climb up to the watch tower and sin herself into damnation with me.

  Our secret romance was a gender reversal of the Rapunzel fairy-tale as I waited anxiously in the watch tower for Evangeline. When she was late I was filled with dread. The crack of gunshots, like firecrackers during Chinese New Year, catapulted me to the window, my heart imploding as I scanned the darkness with my binoculars. When Evangeline came through the trapdoor unscathed, I would smother her with kisses, denying her even a moment to catch her breath.

  In the heyday of our love Evangeline came to see me half a dozen times. Half a dozen two-hour visits. Twelve hours. A pathetically brief length of time to have spent with the love of my life. And yet the thousands of hours I’ve devoted to recollecting these visits have made Evangeline an omnipresence in my mind. Every moment is enshrined in memory. Conversations, word for word. Her nakedness as she shed her dress. The knuckles of spine as she curved away from me, the childlike way she hugged her knees to her scrawny chest. The creases in the laughing corners of her eyes. The petals of flesh, moist ridges sheathing my fingers as they delved inside her. The shadow of a fallen eyelash on her cheek, the instant before I brushed it away.

  I made a soft nest of blankets on the splintery floor. I brought her tins of peaches in syrup, Turkish Delight and Cadbury’s chocolate. I loved watching her eat, licking icing sugar from her fingers and sprinkling morsels for the ants. I made sure our rendezvous were lighthearted. I never asked her about her life before The Village of Everlasting Peace, and never mentioned Detective Pang’s letter. I wanted us to be happy together, to create a refuge from the past. Instead I shared my daydreams of our future in London.

  ‘We can go sightseeing in an open-top double-decker bus. We can go to Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus and the Houses of Parliament. You’ll have to wrap up warm, mind, because it is bitterly cold in the wintertime and you won’t be used to it. It snows as well. You’ve never seen snow, have you? We can make a snowman and go tobogganing on Hampstead Heath. I think I’ll become a teacher and lecture in Mandarin at UCL. Or an author. I’ll publish my memoirs of Malaya and the Emergency and we’ll be filthy rich off the royalties.’

  ‘What will I do?’

  ‘Anything you like. You could teach Chinese or Malay. Or you could be a lady of leisure and do nothing all day long but soak in the bathtub and stuff yourself with rum truffles. I will love you just the same.’

  ‘What about Grace?’

  ‘We’ll hire someone to look after Grace full-time. I will buy a large house so there’s plenty of room. The houses in London are very grand. The shacks in this village are about the size of their back-garden sheds.’

  Evangeline squeezed me in anticipation. ‘I can’t wait to go. I can’t wait to leave this country behind.’

  ‘My contract is up in six months. Then we’ll elope and scandalize everyone! Knock ’em all for six!’

  I joked about us growing arthritic and snowy-haired together, and teased Evangeline, my senior by thirteen years, with predictions of my one day ferrying her about in a wheelchair. It was not out of shame that we kept our relationship a secret. To make it public would have made life harder for both of us. Though she never spoke of it Evangeline was still considered an ex-mistress of the Japanese and to be romantically linked to an Englishman would stigmatize her further (she even forbade me from visiting her hut, lest her neighbours see). And as for me, well, I was happy to do without Charles’s ribald jokes.

  My love for Evangeline was so consuming that it was appallingly late in the day before I noticed the ascendance of the vibrio cholerae in The Village of Everlasting Peace. Such an epidemic had been inevitable of course. The village was a cesspit, the filth of human habitation rising week after week. The drainage system was in the same unfinished condition as the day I arrived (despite our telephone calls to the Public Works Department). Over the months my judgement had lapsed and I’d come to regard this public health risk as acceptable, when it was anything but. There was a Buddhist funeral for a dead child, smoke billowing from the bonfire of her clothes. The queues at the village checkpoint diminished as those who fell ill stayed home. No sooner were the sacked guards replaced than there was another shortfall due to sickness. Though I’d been scheduled to leave the watch tower that week, Sergeant Abdullah insisted he couldn’t let me go.

  The day the epidemic broke I had breakfast alone on the veranda. That lazybones Charles! I thought. But I didn’t go and wake him. It made a nice change to eat my scrambled eggs and ketchup without Charles wincing across the table at me as if I were somehow responsible for his fiercely pounding skull. I hummed along to an old Glenn Miller ballad on the radio as our treacherous cook appeared with a fresh pot of Earl Grey.

  ‘Winston,’ I said, ‘where is Mr Dulwich this morning? Is he still in bed?’

  ‘Eh?’ The secret agent of the insurgency lifted his eyebrows, under orders to feign stupidity at
all times.

  ‘Tuan Dulwich,’ I said. ‘Where is he?’

  Winston nodded to Charles’s bedroom window and clattered up the plates.

  In the office the remnants of an orgy cluttered the table; bottles drained of alcoholic contents, booze-soaked cigarette papers and various items of dope-smoking paraphernalia (which I naively mistook for sophisticated tobacco pipes). Though the quantity of empty bottles would seem excessive to a social tippler, for a piss-artist of Charles’s calibre it was all in a night’s wassailing. Charles was never too hungover to make an appearance at breakfast. Even when he was sulphur yellow and unable to lift his aching head. Has the old devil finally drunk himself to death? I mused. I knocked on his bedroom door. Charles? Charles? There was no reply, so I tentatively pushed open the door and went inside.

  The fumes hit me first. What an eye-watering stink! The odour of mucking-out time at the stables. The room was dark and Charles and Lieutenant Spencer lay inches apart on the bed, breathing open-mouthed in the swampy heat. They wore identical string vests and a cotton sheet was draped over their legs; hobbity feet poked out at the bottom, hairs sprouting from the horny toes. Though it was dim, I could see both men were cast in a pallor far removed from the usual whisky burn of their cheeks. Beside the bed stood a metal bucket, from which the death stench emanated.

  ‘Charles … Charles, are you all right?’

  Charles slept on, eerily peaceful. Spencer whimpered, like a dog having a bad dream.

  ‘Charles!’

  I tugged his swollen big toe (the ingrown toenail was in urgent need of chiropody).

  Charles sighed and, without bothering to open his eyes, said crossly: ‘Christopher! Will you stop ringing that blasted bell! Can’t you see I’m not well?’

  Lieutenant Spencer woke at the sound of his master’s voice. He glared at me out of the angry cracks of his eyes.

  ‘That Goldilocks …? Gerrout! This room’s private!’

  Both men lapsed back into a stupor. Tiny droplets beaded their pallor and they were both fever-bright, as if the cholera bacterium produced an evil luminosity, shining within. Now I come to think of it, the swiftness with which Charles and Spencer succumbed to the Asiatic cholera is rather suspect (especially considering Charles’s strict abstinence from fresh fruit, liquids less than 7 per cent alcohol and any physical contact with the villagers whatsoever). Now Winston Lau’s true identity is known, I am certain of foul play.

  I dialled the Jalang town surgery on the office telephone and requested Dr Fothergill. I said it was a matter of urgency. The receptionist informed me that the doctor had already packed his medical case and left for the village. She told me that the Red Cross were also to be expected before noon.

  Operation Cholera under way, a flock of pretty young Red Cross nurses came in clean white pinafores, Red Cross hats pinned atop their neatly coiffed hair. My Antipodean lovelies Madeleine and Josie came too, but I was assigned to do the rounds with two English novices, Enid and Perdita, the former a staid brunette, and the latter a runaway debutante who’d come to Malaya intent on scandalizing her well-to-do family (though her torrid, scatological new occupation had so far scandalized only herself). There was no infirmary in the village and no beds left at the Jalang town hospital, so the sick were quarantined in their huts. Roughly one in three households were affected, the invalids to be found lying listless on bamboo mats. Though from my limited knowledge of pathogens I knew that cholera was a water-borne disease, at times I was convinced I could detect the illness, as if the sick breathed out a miasma of bacteria, which gathered in oppressive clouds and wafted from hut to hut.

  Our Foreign Devil medical team had a mixed reception as we toured the village. Some households welcomed us with offers of rice and freshly brewed tea. Others were suspicious we were government spies. In every hut the nurses would solemnly recite the five commandments for the treatment and containment of the cholera, which I translated into Cantonese with an equal degree of solemnity: Boil water before drinking. Keep the sick indoors. Administer antibiotic pills and rehydration salts to the sick. Do not throw the waste of the sick in the village drains or latrines. Wash hands after touching the sick or the waste of the sick.

  I was impressed by the Chinese peasants’ stoic attitude towards the illness. Mothers cared calmly for their poorly children (with none of the melodrama and gin-quaffing despair characteristic of the Milnar family matriarch), and invalids stayed in their sickbeds with forbearance and a minimum of fuss. The immigrant Chinese are a hardy and resilient breed. After leaving the shores of China to seek their fortune in Malaya, they’d survived exploitation by the white colonialists, persecution by the Japanese, the bloody reprisals of the MPAJA, and then internment in resettlement camps by the British. The cholera was just another hardship in the long line of hardships that comprised their collective history. The village was not without its martyrs and exhibitionists, though: those who howled for the mercy of the Lord Buddha and squatted to void their bowels, indifferent to the appalled audience. Poor Enid and Perdita had a rude awakening to the grotesqueries of human suffering, as the sick haemorrhaged waste from every orifice. But the two beginner nurses became tougher and more efficient by the hour, and by the end of the epidemic were as shockproof and professional as veterans.

  Dr Fothergill was called to attend to the moribund. The doctor always arrived out of breath and ruddy-cheeked, equipped with his medical case and dressed in pinstriped trousers and waistcoat over his shirt (a bold fashion statement in the tropics). Without a sideways glance, he would march to the back of the hut and press his stethoscope to the patient’s weakly beating heart. The doctor would listen intently for thirty seconds, then, adjusting his toupee (which seemed to make his scalp intolerably itchy in the heat), he’d announce his findings: Christopher, tell the mother her child will improve in a day or two … Nurse, soak a flannel in water and place it in this man’s mouth … chop chop! And on one unhappy occasion, flipping open his silver pocket watch to check the time: I pronounce this man dead at three twenty-three. Hundreds of villagers were taken ill, but only a few died. Though every death is a tragedy, considering how quickly the disease engulfed the village, I think we got off lightly.

  Of everyone in The Village of Everlasting Peace, the missionaries seemed to have the most rewarding time of it during the cholera epidemic. They cancelled their Bible lessons, put on their best flowery dresses and floppy sun bonnets and went canvassing for the Christian faith among the sick. (In their darkest hour people need the Lord! said Blanche.) They went door to door like travelling salesmen, presenting themselves with compassionate smiles and offers of prayer. The Christians were delighted to see them, of course, but the non-Christian households turned them away. Refusing to accept defeat, the missionaries returned to homes that had rejected them with a basket of fruit scones (that Marina had baked at great expense, with ingredients purchased from the Kuala Lumpur Cold Storage). The heathen villagers were curious about the scones and Blanche and Marina were able to bribe their way past many Buddhist altars. Once they’d gained entry Marina would kneel before the defenceless sick, holding open a biblical picture book and turning the pages as Blanche narrated tales of Jesus in Cantonese. The pair could go on for an hour or more, and if the invalids became delirious Blanche would round up an urchin choir to stand outside and sing rousing hymns. The children had memorized the hymns syllable by syllable, and as they sang the lyrics lapsed into Chinese tones – a strange new language, beautiful to my ears (but probably ill appreciated by those doubled over with stomach cramps).

  On the fourth morning of the epidemic the anti-Christians took their revenge. I was drinking a cup of tea on the veranda when I saw the sight that haunts me to this day. The morning sky was grey and rain was pattering softly. On the jungly hills shreds of mist floated motionless, wisps of cloud snagged upon the tallest treetops. It was a lovely tranquil scene, not even spoilt by Charles, snoring like a tone-deaf trombonist in his bed. I was using these stolen moments
to think of Evangeline, when I saw an apparition on the muddy village trail: a lady in white, baptized by raindrops, her dress billowing behind her as she ran, her arms lifting an unidentifiable object above her head. As the lady streaked by the bungalow I saw it was a very distressed Marina Tolbin. I stood and called to her. Miss Tolbin! Miss Tolbin! The missionary didn’t hear me. Had she gone mad? Where was she running to, pell-mell in her nightdress? What was the dark substance dripping down her arms? What was she holding above her head like some sacrificial offering for the pagan gods? As she veered off the trail I realized that it was the severed head of Humphrey the Saint Bernard.

  Fearing Marina had lost her mind, I rushed to the Jesus cottage. Blanche was kneeling in the garden, where Humphrey’s headless cadaver lay in a pool of blood.

  ‘I forgive them for what they have done,’ she said, sad but resolute. ‘I forgive them and love them even as they cast stones at us. I will continue to do my duty and save their damned souls from the conflagration of Hell.’

  Poor old Humphrey. Never again would he lie, panting, in the shade of the papaya tree or … Come to think of it, that was the only thing I ever saw old Humphrey do. I helped Blanche indoors and brewed her a pot of tea. Then I went to notify the police. An hour later Marina returned with Humphrey’s head. The missionaries weren’t so sentimental that they wanted to give Humphrey a Christian burial. When some villagers knocked at the door and timidly asked permission to cook Humphrey’s remains (offering to bring portions of the cooked meat for the bereaved), they let them (though they declined to partake in the feast). After Humphrey’s corpse was carted away in a wheelbarrow, Blanche and Marina shut themselves away for the rest of the day, the evangelical zeal knocked out of them.

  The demise of Humphrey disturbed me. How awful to think the perpetrators were still at large in the village. Assisting the Red Cross on their rounds, however, I was cheered to see, recovered and pottering about, villagers who had been feverish and shaking days before. Even Charles was well enough to resume his rattan throne and boss the sarong-wearing servant boy, who pouted as he served his master glasses of medicinal gin.